I don't think you've read it.

Judging from your comments, I don't think you have read my story about the Royal Inniskilling Fusileers. I tried to copy and paste it from my files to here, but I couldn't make it work. Maybe Blogger doesn't allow that, or maybe it just doesn't like my browser. Ever since Microsoft updated me to IE 10, Blogger has been kind of glitchy about it. I have tried using Google Chrome before, but all I got was pop-up adds, despite my pop-up blocker being enabled. After I finish here, I'll try to send the story to you as an email attachment. We've had good luck with that before.

At the beginning of our senior year at Gage Park, rumor had it that "P" and "W" had started doing it for real over the previous summer. At the beginning of football training, "P's" coach said that he noticed he wasn't playing as well as he had the previous season. "P" said that he had noticed that too, but he wasn't sure how to fix it. The coach than asked him if he had recently become sexually active, because that would tend to take the edge off his game. He told "P" that he would have to decide what was more important to him, football or sex, and "P" chose football. Okay, that was all from the rumor mill, the only thing I know for sure is, after being joined at the hip for three years, "P" and "W" were no longer together. By the time I found out about it, "W" had already hooked up with another guy from a different school. Not that I would have had a snowball's chance in hell, but I certainly would have put in a bid anyway.

My mission in Berlin was to defend West Berlin in the event of a Russian attack. We were told that we could only hope to hold out for about eight hours, but we could take comfort in the knowledge that our deaths would be avenged by the rest of the U.S. troops stationed all over Europe. Actually, it wasn't as grim as all that. Our Government was counting on the Russians being smart enough to appreciate the consequences, so they wouldn't start no shit in the first place. Basically, we were there to establish a U.S. presence in West Berlin, which was supposed to keep the Russians from walking in and claiming it without opposition. It must have worked, because they never did. We were also there to assist the West German forces in the event of a riot or civil disturbance, but that never happened either. I think you're just playing with words when you say we were there to stop the spread of Communism rather than to defend our allies. The two things went together, and we couldn't have done one without doing the other.

I couldn't remember how to spell those Khazars, and I couldn't find anything close in my dictionary. The book I read was interpretive history. It was history, not fiction, but the author admitted that most other scholars didn't share his interpretation of the events. I also remember reading something else that said there are two kinds of Jews in Israel, the ones descended from the original Israelites, and the ones that came from elsewhere, mostly Europe. Another time I read or saw on TV that there were a bunch of Ethiopians, black as the ace of spades, who claimed to be Jewish descendants of Solomon and Sheba, which would have entitled them to immigrate to Israel. The Israeli authorities laughed at first, but then somebody did some DNA testing and declared that those guys were indeed of Israeli descent. The moral of the story is, you never know what's going to come out of your woodpile when you shake it up.